I just finished reading Brad Fitzpatrick’s Thoughts on the Social Graph by way of Anil Dash’s post on it. (It took a couple of days to get through with all of the Hurricane Dean excitement here in Kingston.) The notion is that both users and site developers would be best served by the development of a neutral, third-party application to do the heavy lifting for storing information about your connections (the social graph). Users are tired of having to try and find their friends on every site they consider. On the other side of that same coin, new sites would be able to compete on the basis of their new offering and be able to worry a little less about the network effect necessary to make their application truly useful.What I like most about this document is the recognition that because it sounds like a great idea from a technical or business standpoint, does not necessarily mean it translates to anything of use for a user.
Most users don’t care about XML, protocols, standards, data formats, centralization vs decentralization, silos, lock-in, etc. You, the reader of this document, are not a normal user. To reach the normal users, we must provide them value: some functionality, ease, bling, utility that they can’t get elsewhere.
That’s what it’s all about. People use a product not necessarily because it is technically better but largely because of the incremental utility those products provide. So provide that utility, and you might win those customers. Might. Incremental utility, right?
Fitzpatrick mentions as an example another initiative that he was responsible for, OpenID. OpenID is a decentralized single-signon system very similar in intention to Microsoft’s Passport attempt, but decentralized and based upon open standards. Now, I know I have an OpenID account somewhere. But even with my computer science undergrad, I haven’t taken the time to figure it out. I only mention this because if I’ve hesitated to embrace it, there’s no hope that my parents or someone less technically comfortable will consider it. Not only does there need to be a functional improvement over current solutions, it needs to be immediately apparent to the lay-person. Fitzpatrick, I’m sure, is aware of the challenge, but it’s still a significant obstacle.
Lastly, let me don my little tin-foil hat for a second and ask do I really want any single entity, open or otherwise, being so entrenched in my life? It’s interesting to watch how we sometimes willingly and other times unwittingly give up greater and greater amounts of information about ourselves for greater functionality. For instance, having GPS in my phone would make a host of services possible but do I want anyone to know where I am all the time? Fitzpatrick mentions a great degree of controls over who gets access to what data and what friends are linked where. I think that would be necessary for adoption, but I also hope that the controls don’t make it so complicated that it is intimidating to use.
It’s clearly easier to ask questions and search out problems than it is to offer up solutions. The former is what I’m doing and the latter, Fitzpatrick. Very cool idea. I hope it works out.
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